Services Industriels de Genève chooses the Sciforma Solution for its overall Project Management

London, 23 may 2011
SIG (Services Industriels de Genève) is an autonomous Genevan public company founded on 4 June 1895. Its capital is shared between the State of Geneva, the City of Geneva
and the Communes. Its statutes make it an entirely separate, autonomous company. It supplies and monitors the quality of the water, gas, electricity and thermal energy, treats the waste and waste water and provides a fibre optic network for the region.
The management of these varied activities requires excellent organisation and perfect internal management of the resources so as to ensure the success of current and future projects.

Creation of a New Engineering Office to Improve Cooperation and Centralise Skills

In 2007, SIG decided to reorganise its resources and created a new organisation named “IPRO”, from the French initials for “Engineering Project Network Work”. Its aim was to create and bring together in one office the
various types of engineers at SIG (hydraulic, electrical, thermal and civil engineers and architects, etc.) so as to centralise their skills and increase the synergies.

"Because of our technical skills and our different activities, complex projects were already being managed from start to finish. However, each of these projects was managed differently, making it difficult to have an overall
view of them and to implement homogeneous reporting tables for management," said Philippe Liechti, the SIG IT Customer Solutions Manager. "Everyone organised projects in their own way in their own area and the
managers often found that the information was scattered among a multitude of files in different formats. With the liberalisation of the electricity and gas markets, the pressure on SIG and its projects increased, with tighter and
tighter requirements for financial management and delivery dates: technical competence alone was no longer enough".

The Need for a New Tool for Better Management, Organisation and Unity: selecting PSNext

The implementation of IPRO was therefore an opportunity to adopt a new project management tool and test it in the new organisation.
The aim was to find a solution that would make it possible to unite the engineers around one language, to use common work methods and to be able to administer and access company resources through one single data base.
One of the greatest expectations was to be able to rapidly generate homogeneous, accessible reports so that all contributors could benefit from them. This tool would therefore not be solely for the upper echelons but would be
used by all those involved in projects (customers, project team members, etc.) in order to help them to manage their day-to-day work better.

By mid-2007, the different solutions on the market had been studied by SIG's contributors. "Several tools were evaluated and three were installed and tested.
The evaluation covered their TCO and their features," explained Philippe Liechti. "In the end, it was Sciforma's solution, PSNext, that was chosen. It stood out from the rest because of its user friendliness, its simple,
accessible interface and also its very significant quality-price ratio2."

Deployment in Only 7 Months

Deployment in the new IPRO organisation started at the beginning of 2008, with some fifty contributors.
So as to involve the future users and to fully understand their needs, SIG organised workshops with consultants from Sciforma. Their experience with deploying PSNext in other companies was used to great advantage.
These exchanges made it possible to:

discuss the organisational processes to be implemented in the tool

understand in detail the numerous features of the tool and select those that fitted SIG's needs best

define the different configuration to be added to PSNext (new fields, processes, reports, etc.)

In parallel, other parts of SIG were invited to the presentation so that they could in turn implement PSNext.

The definition of the various processes lasted for 6 months (not a minor change in the organisation of day-to-day work). In contrast, the configuration of the tool took only a few weeks, because of the ease and flexibility
with which the tool can be configured.

"We were able to rely on the Sciforma team from the very beginning. They were always ready to listen to us and they trained us on PSNext while giving us custom-tailored service. The configuration of the tool was
done in a very natural way because of Sciforma's great responsiveness and attention to our needs," said Philippe Liechti, SIG Customer Solutions Manager. "PSNext was adopted progressively by our contributors,
in the space of about one year.” Everyone quickly became interested and became comfortable with it, which helped them to organise their everyday work better."

PSNext, a Flexible Tool that Complements SAP

The SIG IT system runs on a SAP system. As well as deploying PSNext, in cooperation with Sciforma, the SIG programmers therefore developed interfaces for communicating with SAP and for extracting supplementary information.
The first module was created to link to financial and accounting information. The aim was for a project leader to be able to have better visibility and an overall view of the projects, their budgets and the costs.
A second module made it possible to integrate human resources related information that was managed in SAP into PSNext. This second interface allows a project leader to always have up-to-date resources.
These two modules therefore enhanced the new tool and its day-to-day interest for management and all the company's contributors.
With the interface with SAP, PSNext makes it possible, on the one hand, to plan and manage current projects better, and, on the other, to replace the innumerable Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft Project files
that everyone was using.

An Avalanche of Benefits for Management and the Workers

Originally, PSNext was only to be used by the new organisation, IPRO but the benefits were significant enough for other parts of SIG to adopt it: In 2008, the contributors of the IT Department and Project Office began
to use it. In 2009, it was the turn of the Electricity Distribution and Public Works Departments to manage the planning of their respective worksites with it.

Today, 130 SIG contributors use PSNext to manage an average of 700 projects and worksites per year.

Thanks to Sciforma's tool, project and resource management has become much easier. Having improved planning has also made it possible to anticipate some problems more easily and therefore to have time to
face up to them. Another benefit is that cooperation between the different organisations has become closer because communications are better, through a common language and a common tool.

"Everyone has profited from it, in terms of time and efficiency: The language, the project stages and the reports are common to all the projects, organisation is more effective and information on our projects is more readily accessible.
Among the qualities of the PSNext tool, we have especially appreciated its flexibility, for configuration and for the possibility of adapting it to our specific business needs,"
explained Philippe Liechti. "Our workers have noticed that it is now much simpler to work together and they have come to like this."

Sciforma has taken care to see that PSNext has operated correctly since 2008 by offering support and an ongoing analysis of the needs of the contributors. Their team continues to develop the tool so as to continue to
respond directly to the expectations of the SIG users. In 2011, some twenty new users will adopt the tool. SIG also hopes to create a PSNext users' club where employees can share their experiences and exchange the best practices in project management.

About SIG

SIG is an autonomous public company, with a capital of 100 million Swiss Francs shared between the State of Geneva (55%), the city of Geneva (30%) and the Communes of Geneva (15%). Its continued existence and
development are ensured by the revenue from its sales, as it receives no aid or subsidies from the authorities. It supplies water, gas, electricity and thermal energy, treats waste and waste water and provides a fibre optic
network. SIG's aim is to carry out its activities with sufficient profit to prepare for the future and to respond to the growth of its markets.
More information: www.sig-ge.ch